


Twisted Round Her Little Finger

by Ostentenacity



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/F, Introspection, Manipulation, Monster girlfriends, Post-The Unknowing (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:20:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28319595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ostentenacity/pseuds/Ostentenacity
Summary: Annabelle’s eyes glint. “Just think of what a lovely puppet you’d make.”Well then. “Goodness me,” says Nikola. “How could I possibly decline such an offer?”---After the Unknowing, Annabelle Cane digs Nikola Orsinov out of the rubble of the House of Wax.
Relationships: Annabelle Cane/Nikola Orsinov
Comments: 20
Kudos: 42
Collections: Rusty Quill Secret Santa 2020





	Twisted Round Her Little Finger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quantumducky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quantumducky/gifts).



> This is a treat (extra prompt fill) for RQ Secret Santa 2020. I was scanning the request list and “misuse of spooky powers for romantic purposes” caught my eye.
> 
> Thanks to dinosaurrainbowstarfish and [pinehutch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinehutch/) for beta reading!
> 
> Content warnings at the end.

Nikola lies in the wreckage for a long, long time.

There’s some brief excitement early on. The search-and-rescue team exclaim when they spot her torso sticking out of the rubble, but when they discover she isn’t human, they quickly lose interest.

“Creepy,” the last one to wander off mutters, and aims a kick at her leg where it lies several feet away.

Nikola _tsks._ “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that it’s _frightfully_ rude to kick strangers?” It’s a testament to the depth of her despondency that, when the man jumps nearly out of his skin and swears a blue streak, she only feels the faintest ghost of satisfaction, rather than the deeper fulfillment of a scare well-executed.

She doesn’t even skin him. Couldn’t, even if she’d been inclined. Her hands aren’t connected to the rest of her anymore. She can still move them, of course, but she doesn’t know where they _are._ Aside from being trapped by rubble, that is, but that doesn’t narrow it down much. Even if she had been physically capable, though, she still would’ve been too busy sulking.

They find the Archivist fairly quickly, and cart him off on a stretcher. He looks fairly dead. Nikola hopes he’s dead. It would serve him right, for so rudely interfering with Nikola’s lovely dance. They find the Archivist’s little friend, the one who’d held the detonator, a few days later. He’s definitely dead. Again, Nikola feels only the most fleeting pang of spiteful joy, before lapsing back into self-pity.

Time passes. A crew of uniformed workers arrive, bringing noisy machines with them: jackhammers, an excavator, a crane. The human remains had been removed long before, but nobody had bothered to dig a broken mannequin out of the debris. (Or any of the wax figures, for that matter, but they’re not important anymore. Nikola is the only member of the Circus left.)

She supposes she’ll have to decide what to do now. Tempting as it is to just wait and see where the humans cart her off to, she suspects that spending too long in a landfill, surrounded by the cast-off rubbish of a million human lives, would most likely lead to her becoming something other than herself. An agent of some other terrible change, of a tedious apocalypse of human devising, rather than of her own incomprehensible and glorious apotheosis.

Nikola is unlikely to ever achieve that goal, now. But she can’t think of anything more dreadfully dull than lying in a pile of rubbish and metamorphosing into rubbish herself. Even hiding in the back room of a shop and subsisting off of cheap scares from tired, oblivious employees sounds more enjoyable.

Even so, it’s hard to muster up the will to move.

* * *

The evening before the construction workers are scheduled to pick up the patch of rubble Nikola is still lying in, someone new breaks into the lot.

Well, perhaps “breaking in” is putting it too strongly. As far as Nikola saw, she’d just walked right in through the chain-link gate. The construction workers don’t bat an eyelash.

The new person squats down next to Nikola’s head, setting down a bundled-up trench coat and two empty clipboards. “I wasn’t sure you’d still be here,” she says. Conversationally, as though they’d already been in the middle of a friendly chat. “Thought you might have moved on by now.”

Nikola turns her head. The interloper doesn’t even flinch. She’s not dressed like one of the workers; her jumper is a gauzy, colorful eyesore that looks older than the woman herself, and even the most negligent of foremen would banish her for bringing those heels within ten meters of the construction site. Her bright yellow hard hat is so uncannily incongruous with the rest of her outfit that Nikola is actually, honestly impressed.

“Who _are_ you?” asks Nikola.

“My name is Annabelle,” says the woman. Ah. “Nikola Orsinov, I presume?”

“Indeed! How _delightful_ to finally meet you, Miss Cane,” says Nikola. “I would offer to shake your hand, but I’m not actually sure where my hands are at the moment. Dreadfully careless of me, I know, but the fact remains.”

Annabelle chuckles.

“Which, I suppose, raises a rather important question,” Nikola continues. “Is there a _reason_ you’ve come to visit little old broken me?”

“There is,” says Annabelle. “I thought I’d offer you a chance to work together. I think we could help one another.”

“You did hear me when I said little old _broken_ me, yes?”

Annabelle’s teeth gleam white against the gathering gloom of the evening. “Oh, come now, Nikola. We both know that’s no obstacle.” She shifts her hard hat so that Nikola can see the bottom edge of a very large and cobwebby crater behind her ear.

Nikola considers. “And if I tell you I’d rather take care of myself?”

It’s empty posturing, and they both know it. Annabelle doesn’t remark on the unlikelihood of Nikola managing to escape the lot without leaving anything behind, let alone re-attaching the various bits of herself while her hands are still useless scuttling things, stuck on the ground by gravity. Instead, she just smiles again. “I suppose you could, if that’s what you _really_ want,” she says. Her eyes glint. “But just think of what a lovely puppet you’d make.”

Well then. “Goodness me,” says Nikola. “How could I possibly decline such an offer?”

* * *

Nikola follows Annabelle out of the wreckage of the wax museum. The workers’ eyes skate right over their matching hard hats and clipboards, just as Annabelle had said they would. “Easiest kind of manipulation there is,” she’d remarked.

Nikola supposes one could see it that way. But really, it’s just another form of pretending, of becoming a familiarly unfamiliar face.

As she leaves, she can’t resist a nibble. Annabelle keeps her head high, her eyes focused on the middle distance, but Nikola catches the gaze of the security guard by the gate and winks one painted-on eye before flipping up the collar of her borrowed coat. The guard drops his coffee. Annabelle is still facing forward, but Nikola catches a glimpse of an indulgent smile anyway, before she covers it with one hand.

* * *

The trip back to Annabelle’s house in Oxford is dreadfully boring. Now that everything’s more-or-less attached again, Nikola is feeling a good deal more sprightly than she had been in the wreckage of the House of Wax. Still, she doesn’t dare to try and have a little fun with the other passengers, the way she might have before the ruin of her dance; there are too many of them, and she’s not what she once was. More than once, Nikola considers asking Annabelle to join in—two heads are better than one, and all that—but she doesn’t.

Once they’re in Annabelle’s house, Annabelle takes Nikola apart again. First, she cleans off the messy gobs of cobweb she’d used to hastily stick Nikola’s limbs back in place; then, she starts cleaning off the dust and grime. Some paint comes with it, falling off in singed flakes. Annabelle sighs over each one.

Eventually, Annabelle sits back and regards her work, one finger tapping absentmindedly against her lips.

“Be honest, doctor,” says Nikola from where she lies, in pieces, on the table. “Am I going to live?”

Annabelle cracks a smile. “Oh, I think you’ll be just fine,” she says. “Once I’m done repainting you, anyway. Stay right here.” She pats Nikola’s shoulder and vanishes out the door. Nikola almost makes a quip about not being able to leave even if she wanted to, but, well, that’s rather the point, isn’t it?

If a human were in her position, they’d most likely be scared stiff, Nikola reflects, as she waits for Annabelle to come back. Usually, Nikola is glad to not be a person. It sounds like a dreadfully dull sort of existence. Not to mention stifling. Oh, the humans go on and on in their self-help books and inspirational speeches about re-inventing themselves, about making themselves anew, but they don’t, really, do they? They change a habit, a haircut, a house, and call it a blank slate. Nikola shakes her head in disgust as best she can in her current position. They don’t even change their _skins._ Nikola, on the other hand…

But, just this once, she finds herself feeling a bit wistful over her lack of humanity. She’s a nightmare, a creature of fear, but she can’t experience what she doles out, not really. It’s rare to get to experience the work of another master, and here she is, helpless and in pieces and not even _afraid._ It’s a bit of a waste.

Though it would be difficult to achieve the same effect with a human, Nikola muses. Taking a human to pieces is always such a messy business, and they expire on the spot about half the time, too, which is no fun at all. So maybe it’s not a waste at all. Maybe it’s something Annabelle can only do to Nikola. Or to something like her, at least.

Annabelle returns in the middle of Nikola’s contemplation with an armful of paints and brushes. This part is familiar: being altered, turned into something else. Annabelle’s hands are gentle, so gentle, as she re-paints Nikola in new colors, as she threads new wires through her smashed joints. As she attaches marionette strings, each as fine as a single hair and much less visible, to a dozen points on Nikola’s body. Nikola imagines those gentle hands tugging on those lovely, delicate strings, and feels an urge to shiver.

They both admire Annabelle’s handiwork in the mirror, afterwards. Nikola looks a bit like an antique rag doll now—or, at least, like a sculptor’s idea of one. “You could be an actual rag doll, if you wanted,” says Annabelle when Nikola remarks on the resemblance. “I can sew as well as I paint. Better, even.”

Her fingers brush against the inner side of Nikola’s forearm. Demonstrating where a seam could go, maybe. Or, perhaps, just touching for its own sake.

“If _I_ want?” asks Nikola.

Again, that smile. “If you want.”

* * *

It’s easy to get things done, it seems, if you’re Annabelle. Technically, the dance studio is supposed to be empty, awaiting a new lease. But with the lights on, with new signs in the windows, it looks like a completely different place. Prospective tenants are always so confused, so _worried_ that they’ve come to the wrong place, that they’re missing their appointments.

Sometimes it feels almost uncomfortably close to doing the Spiral’s work for it. But needs must.

Nikola wears a new skin, at first, and Annabelle keeps her head wound covered. It wouldn’t do to frighten their prospective victims off before they can get hooked. But, gradually, the two of them begin to let the mask slip. Just a bit at a time, just enough to make the hapless students wonder if they’d _really_ seen what they thought they’d seen. Enough to make them agonize about whether to come back, about whether the joy of becoming something quick and whirling and _other_ for a few short, blissful hours a week is worth the danger their little hindbrains scream so loudly about.

Nikola had never realized before just how much fear, how much awful, _delicious_ dread, can be wrung out of knife-edge indecision. Maintaining the balance is child’s play. All Nikola has to do is make sure the students never really get to know each other, never trust each other enough to share their fears. Annabelle takes care of the rest.

The students keep coming back. Even once they’ve noticed that Nikola is a marionette. Even after they’ve watched Annabelle dance both parts of a waltz, fingers twitching against Nikola’s shoulder as she directs the placement of her feet. Even now that they’ve begun to see their own puppet strings.

It’s a thing of true beauty. Nikola could never have managed it by herself, not even when she had the full strength of the Circus behind her. More and more, she finds that she’s actually _happy_ at the turn events have taken.

“Happy? Really?” Annabelle murmurs, as they twirl across the studio floor one evening with the lights low. All of the students have gone home, and the remnants of their simmering dread hang in the air like the sweetest perfume.

“Oh, the Unknowing would have been _delightful,_ of course,” says Nikola. “But if it had gone as planned, I never would have had _this.”_ She bends her knee, and Annabelle, laughing softly, allows herself to be dipped.

Time passes so quickly on nights like this. They whirl around the room, faster and faster and faster, losing themselves to the movement, until they are no longer a spider and a marionette, and only the dance remains. It’s always a shock when the first of their students knocks timidly on the studio door, ready to begin the cycle over again.

(If she were a person, Nikola thinks, she might wonder whether the way she feels about Annabelle is real. But Nikola _isn’t_ a person, no more than Annabelle is. Considerably less than Annabelle is, in fact. And what does “real” mean, anyway? A diamond made in a lab is no less hard than one pried from the earth, and it sparkles the same, too. So what if her new-found admiration—even infatuation—with her puppeteer is by design? It feels no different, either way.)

She knows, by now, what Annabelle is planning. Annabelle hasn’t _told_ her, per se, but there isn’t much point in expending effort on keeping it a secret; Nikola is both clever and utterly incapable of betrayal. Or, at the very least, incapable of betraying _Annabelle._

Nikola is quite aware of the fact that, for all her disdain at the idea of becoming an agent of someone else’s apocalypse, she’s managed to find herself in exactly that position. She understands that this is a diversion, that Annabelle is biding her time until that _dreadful_ bore Elias—or should she call him Jonah? She’s never quite been sure—can finish his dastardly, _dull_ scheme. It’s all very ironic.

But the more Nikola plays straight into Annabelle’s hands (ambivalently, intentionally, _helplessly),_ the more she wonders if this isn’t even better, really. She has turned so very, very many people into strange, unfamiliar, funhouse-mirror versions of themselves. Maybe it’s fitting that, at long last, she should receive the same treatment. Maybe the best way to embody the fear of becoming something _other_ is to be compromised, led astray, _subverted._ To be made to embody an entirely different nightmare.

Or maybe Nikola is just rationalizing. Trying to justify in retrospect the fact that the Web made her its servant, and she realized, and did nothing.

Oh, well. It’s not like it makes any difference, in the end. Either way, Nikola has no desire—let alone will—to do anything about it.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: canon-typical Stranger body horror, canon-typical Web mind games/loss of autonomy, mentions of canonical character death, mentions of avatars manipulating/scaring/preying on innocent people, character thinking of being manipulated/changed as a good/pleasant/fulfilling thing
> 
> Tell me your favorite line, if you like :)


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